


code blue

by illuminatedcities



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Hospital, Awkward Flirting, Blowjobs, F/F, Flirting, M/M, Mutual Pining, Past Relationship(s), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-26
Updated: 2016-07-26
Packaged: 2018-07-26 21:42:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7591459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/illuminatedcities/pseuds/illuminatedcities
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“My dick,” Harold says, with as much dignity as he can muster, “is not your personal lemon popsicle.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	code blue

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much to sky for super-fast & excellent beta <333

**Code Blue:** a medical emergency code used to indicate that a patient requires resuscitation or is in need of immediate medical attention, for example in case of sudden cardiac arrest.

–

"Can't sleep, either?"

Outside, the rain is drumming against the concrete in the darkness. John leans against the open gate in his reflective sweatpants and polo shirt, smoking a cigarette. He inhales, and the end of the cigarette glows like a forlorn lightning bug.

Harold shrugs. "I suffer from insomnia even when I'm not on call."

The little black pager on his belt stayed mercifully silent for the last few hours. Harold guesses it's probably around two by now. It's hard to tell; night shifts tend to screw with your perception that way.

John flicks ash off the end of his cigarette. He's pleasant to work with, Harold thinks. Calm, quiet, gentle with scared patients. He drives like a maniac, though. Harold stumbled out of the ambulance the first time John was behind the wheel and spent a few seconds trying not to throw up onto the sidewalk. John watched him with an amused expression. "You alright?"

"Fine," Harold said, clenching his teeth. He grabbed his bag and clipboard and tried to ignore the way the street was spinning around him.

He takes a sip of his tea. There is a big thermos with coffee waiting for him in the communal kitchen, but if his pager stays quiet, Harold doesn't see why he shouldn't try to get some sleep in the on-call room later. It's not like he has anything to do but to wait until the nightshift ends and a colleague shows up around seven freshly showered and shaved and puts him out of his misery.

Harold can see the outline of the ambulances in the garage. With the lights off, it looks like they're sleeping, giant, dozing animals in the darkness. Harold pats down his pockets and flips open his last pack of cigarettes only to realize that it's empty. _Shit._

"Here, wait," John says. He produces a cigarette and, to Harold's surprise, puts it between his lips to light it.

Harold looks at John's mouth for a moment, the way he hollows his cheeks when he takes a drag, inhaling the smoke. The end of the cigarette flares up, bright and hot in the darkness. John takes it and passes it on to Harold. Their fingers brush when Harold gingerly takes the offered cigarette. John's skin feels warm, and Harold has to remind himself not to linger.

He takes a greedy drag. Nasty habit, but he won't live on the job for a week if he tries to quit. "Thank you," he says.

"You're welcome," John says. He curves his hand around his mouth like he wants to hide his expression.

They smoke in silence for a moment.

"Did you eat anything earlier?" John asks.

Harold blinks. He didn't, he was busy catching up on paperwork and forgot to order pizza with the paramedics. Since Shaw is on call with them, there's no chance of leftovers making it to the fridge, either. "I think there are crackers in one of the cupboards," Harold says, grimacing. “Some peanut butter, if I'm lucky.” Now that he thinks about it, his stomach is growling with hunger.

John laughs, a pleasant, warm sound. "I was going to fix me an omelet anyway, feel free to join me."

Harold squints at him. The emergency department isn't exactly known for culinary skill.

"I make _amazing_ omelets," John says.

Maybe it's Harold's imagination, or the fact that he's severely sleep deprived, but it looks like John is batting his absurdly long lashes at him. Harold takes a deep drag from his cigarette. "I bet you do," he says.

"I have to make sure you're in a state to save lives, Dr. Finch," John says. No, there is _definitely_ some lash-batting going on.

Harold swallows. "I don't think that's in your job description, actually."

John puts out his cigarette under the heel of one heavy boot before disposing of the stub. "I can multi-task."

He steps closer. He's taller than Harold remembers. When John puts a hand on Harold's chest, Harold actually holds his breath. A second later, John slides his own pack of cigarettes into Harold's breast pocket, and Harold feels like an _idiot._

"In case you should get a craving later," John says, tapping his finger lightly against Harold's pocket. _Christ._

_"Thank you,"_ Harold croaks.

John gives him a brief nod and then walks away towards the kitchen. If Harold were a better person, he might be able to refrain from staring at John's ass in the tight reflective pants, but his self-restraint only extends so far. He tries to muster some disgust at the non-flammable polyester uniform pants with the garish red and orange reflective stripes, if only because they insult his fashion sense, but he still watches the curve of John's buttocks in the tight material until he disappears through the door.

Harold shifts his weight from one foot to the other and takes a desperate drag from his cigarette. Excellent, now he's sleep-deprived, hungry _and_ horny.

–

As it turns out, John _does_ make amazing omelets, and Harold polishes off his own serving without setting down the fork once. John watches him with an amused expression on his face. He flips a second omelet in the pan with a casual movement of his wrist that Harold could never pull off.

Once Harold is done, John wordlessly exchanges his empty plate for one with more delicious-looking bell pepper and onion omelet on it, and Harold is too hungry to worry about whether he's being impolite. He doesn't remember the last time he ate something with appetite instead of just shoveling take out from a paper carton into his mouth while writing up an emergency protocol.

Harold scrapes the last crumbs of food off the plate. “God, that was _delicious._ ”

In front of the stove, John forgets to cover his mouth with his hand before he smiles.

Harold squints at the pager's battery. The silence is starting to make him suspicious, it's an unwritten law of emergency medicine that you'll be paged the very second you sit down to eat. The little display is lit and showing a battery symbol with three bars, more than enough charge to last through the night.

“All good?” John asks. He has sat down next to Harold and is working through his own meal, his long legs stretched out under the table.

“All good,” Harold says. “Thanks for, well. The cooking. It wasn't terrible.”

_It wasn't terrible?_ Harold considers, for the millionth time, if maybe he should have chosen a career in medical research instead of making an attempt to deal with people on a regular basis. At least bacterial colonies would not be bothered by his painful lack of social skills.

The lines around John's eyes deepen with his smile in a profoundly attractive way that makes Harold sweat, and he quickly looks away. “Anytime, Dr. Finch,” he says.

“Please, call me Harold.”

John tilts his head. _“Harold,_ ” he says, like he's learning how the name feels in his mouth, the weight of it on his tongue.

Harold spends a few minutes trying to think of a way to make him say it again, except then both their pagers go off at once, the shrill sound startling and too loud in the quiet kitchen.

The little box buzzes against Harold's thigh until he has fumbled the leather flap open and turned it off. “Suspected AMI,” Harold says, reading the information from the display while they're making their way into the garage. “What is it with heart attacks and the early hours of morning?”

“If we might end up doing CPR, I better step on the gas,” John says, grinning.

They sit down and fasten their seat belts, and Harold resists the temptation to cross himself.

“As long as you don't kill the both of us by driving this car into a ditch or wrapping it around a tree, I don't care about your driving habits,” Harold says.

John revs up the engine, pulls out of the garage and takes the first corner sharply enough that Harold has to stop his clipboard from falling off the dashboard. He puts a hand against the door to steady himself, cursing under his breath. Harold could swearthat he has seen a smirk on John's face, not to mention that he's rather sure that driving like a _clinically insane person_ is not absolutely necessary to reach a patient in time.

John turns on the siren and zips by a few cars without slowing down.

“I retract my previous statement,” Harold says faintly, while John changes lanes so they're headed into oncoming traffic, apparently trusting that people won't be morons and actually manage to notice the ambulance with the blue flashing lights and the obnoxious siren coming their way. (You would _think_ they would, but in this as much as anything else, humans are idiots, Harold has found, and he doesn't particularly want to be on the other side of an emergency operation just because some idiot driver was too busy fiddling with his cellphone to notice them.)

“I'll keep you safe, Harold, don't worry,” John says in that annoyingly attractive, hoarse voice he has, and Harold groans and puts a hand over his eyes and imagines himself in a small, quiet lab, pipetting samples and running PCR cycles in peace.

–

Harold has no idea if it's coincidence that he ends up on so many shifts with John, or if it is the result of someone's careful planning and manipulation of the duty roster. Whichever it is, he can't say that he minds. John usually brings in a bag of groceries and cooks meals in the big kitchen if their pagers stay silent, or produces plastic containers with an obscene amount of leftovers that he keeps in the fridge, with a note attached to them that says _'Go ahead Harold, you know you want to.'_

(The first time Harold sneaks into the kitchen at four am and finds one of the notes taped to a large plastic container in the fridge, he closes the door and leans against it, appalled. He is a man of self-restraint, he can resist the temptation of a few Tupperware containers. He manages to resist for exactly ten minutes before he opens the fridge again, and ends up eating three spoonfuls of lasagna without bothering to pop the box in the microwave first. It is, infuriatingly enough, _delicious._ )

–

Harold spends a few weeks marginally annoyed at John's culinary skills and a few more trying to ignore the way John keeps bringing him tea into the on-call room and looks at him in the half-darkness of the garage while he smokes his cigarettes.

Harold is used to aching for things he knows he has no right to want.

–

One day, Harold is busy getting a patient ready for transport, most likely a perforated appendix, though it's hard to tell for sure in a pre-clinical setting. Harold has just attached a bottle of electrolyte solution when he sees John crouching in front of the man's son, a scared little boy with startling blue eyes. Harold had all but forgotten about the kid, too busy trying to complete a physical examination on a patient who was squirming and groaning in pain.

“It's going to be fine,” John says, one hand on the kid's shoulder, “We'll take really good care of your dad, okay?”

The boy nods and wipes his nose with his hand.

“Ready?” Root asks next to Harold. She closes the doors in the back of the ambulance, obscuring his view.

Harold hands her the vials of blood he has taken when he put in the IV and straps himself into the seat next to the stretcher. “Sure, let's get a move on, he should get into surgery ASAP.”

–

“You're good with kids,” Harold says, later.

They sit on a bench outside of the garage, catching the last rays of late evening sun. John holds a cup of coffee, palms closed around the porcelain. He shrugs. “Kids are simple,” he says. “They just say what they mean.”

Harold lights a cigarette and passes the lighter on to John. They sit in silence for a moment.

“Would be nice to have a child. Children,” John says, his voice all soft around the edges.

Harold turns to look at him. He considers the implications for a moment. “It's a difficult line of work, countless shifts, many hours away from home. There are lots of people who still make it work.”

The corner of John's mouth twitches. It's not a happy expression. “My last girlfriend, Jessica? She got tired of waiting after a few years. Being with someone who's never home, it puts a strain on everything, no matter how close you are. I don't blame her, it's just that I don't really know what else I'm supposed to be doing with my life, you know?”

Harold nods. “The job will eat you up if you let it,” he says. He thinks about Grace, all the ways in which he managed to disappoint her. “ _It's like I'm in a relationship with a ghost, Harold,”_ she said. _“Even when you're here with me, you're not really here.”_

John nods. “Maybe I'll get another shot at it sometime.”

Harold would really like to say something comforting, but he can't think of anything apart from _You have lots of time,_ and if he has learned anything in their field, then it's that _this_ isn't true.

–

It has been raining for about a _decade_ by now, and Harold is rather sure that it won't ever stop. He peels off his wet jacket and socks, then walks barefoot over the corridor and into the locker room. He is rooting around in the spare uniforms and shirts when the door opens and John comes in, shirtless and dripping wet. Harold nearly hits his head on a wooden shelf.

“Are we out of fresh laundry again?” John asks. He peeks over Harold's shoulder, apparently unbothered by the fact that he's dripping a substantial amount of rain water onto Harold.

His hair is wet and shiny with rain, and a few drops run down over his chest and belly. There is a trail of dark hair leading down to his navel that makes Harold's mouth turn dry. “Seems like it,” Harold says. He hopes that he doesn't sound as hysterical as he feels.

John runs a hand through his hair, smoothing it back. Harold grits his teeth. Is he doing that on _purpose_?

“I'll take a look at the storage unit in the back, sometimes they keep spare shirts over there,” John says.

His pants are sitting low on his hips, and Harold can see a thin scar on his lower abdomen, most likely from an appendectomy. The other scars are a little more difficult to place, and Harold probably stares for a few seconds too long.

“I was in the army before I trained as a paramedic,” John says. His self-assurance is remarkable to Harold; he envies John's ability to feel so comfortable in his own skin. “That one's a gunshot wound and this, well.” He gestures to a light web of scars over his left side. “Stood too close to an explosion.”

“I know how that feels like,” Harold blurts before he can stop himself.

John raises a curious eyebrow at him. Harold just wishes he would _put on a shirt._

“I was one of the first responders at the ferry bombing six years ago,” Harold says, and John sobers up instantly.

“There was a second explosion, wasn't there? When the ambulances had already arrived,” John says.

Harold leans against the wall. “There was. A friend of mine was one of the emergency physicians on the scene with me. Anyone with even a scrap of trauma experience was out there, trying to help. They believe it was probably one of the gas tanks that caught fire and exploded.”

Harold tries to shake the memory of Nathan's face, looking over at him across the debris.

“ _I told you to choose something boring,”_ Harold said to him on the way there. _“Ear, Nose, Throat, maybe. Dermatology.”_

“ _Bite me, Harold,”_ Nathan said, brushing his fringe out of his eyes and elbowing him in the side.

Harold's hand comes up to the back of his neck, an instinctual gesture. “He didn't make it, he was too close to the explosion.”

The force of the blast knocked Harold back, gave him a fractured spine and a broken hip. Excruciating physical therapy and sheer stubbornness are the only reasons he is able to walk without a limp, and even so, the pain never fully subsided.

“I'm really sorry,” John says quietly.

“I haven't talked about this in years,” Harold says. He scrubs a hand over his face. God, he's tired.

“I'll see if I can get you some dry clothes,” John says. He rests his hand on Harold's shoulder for a moment before he leaves, and Harold leans into the touch, a small indulgence.

–

Harold peels off his latex gloves when he gets out of the car. His hands feel sweaty, and there's a tremor running through them that still comes with the adrenaline crash, even after all these years.

He mentally goes through his checklist in his head, a list of things he needs to reassure himself of. As much as he knows that his patients will be taken care of once they're dropped off at the hospital, there's still a voice in his head that says _Are you sure you thought of everything? Are you sure?_

–

He called the hospital from the on-call room once, his cellphone clumsy in his hand. “Make sure to check her pupils again,” Harold said, rubbing his temple with his fingers.

The attending he had delivered the patient to, overworked and cranky, had not taken it well. _“What the hell? If something was wrong with her neuro status, why didn't you write it into the fucking emergency protocol?”_

“Her pupillary response was fine,” Harold said, gritting his teeth. “She had no neurological deficit. I don't know how to explain it, but I am worried that she gave discreet signs of elevated intracranial pressure that might go unnoticed.”

Harold felt like an idiot. He had talked to the patient, examined her head, done simple tests to make sure her brain was fine. It wasn't like she had been slow to answer, and her head injury wasn't even their main concern at the time.

“ _We'll run a CAT-scan on her anyway after we're done taking care of her comminuted fractures, I don't see– shit.”_ There was a rustling on the line. _“Ma'am? Miss Jennings?”_ The doctor's voice sounded far away, like he was turning away from the phone. _“Since when has she been unconscious?”_ The voice came back more clearly. _“Congratulations, her right pupil's blown and her GCS just dropped to five, she's going to the neurosurgical ICU.”_

In Harold's opinion, medicine is 40% science, 20% skill and 40% pure dumb luck, so it usually pays to listen to your gut and make sure to double check your results.

–

Harold spent exactly five minutes sitting on his bed in the on-call room with his head in his hands ( _Breathe in. Hold your breath for five seconds. Exhale slowly. Repeat.)_ when there's a knock on the door.

“If this is about pizza, I don't want any,” Harold says.

Their last case has been a traffic accident, lots of crushed metal, a shattered taillight on the asphalt, the sudden hammering pulse in his ears. _How many victims? Airway, Breathing, Circulation, Disability, Exposure. Who is in lethal danger?_

It wasn't that bad, in the end, everyone alive and shaky, some whiplash-syndrome in the making, a few bruised limbs. Thank _god._ Harold hates traffic accidents as a first responder, not least because there's a real chance some idiot will be too distracted to mind the police barricades and run you over with their car.

“It's about tea,” John's voice calls back from outside.

Harold briefly considers playing dead, but he already gave himself away by speaking up. “Come in.”

John opens the door carefully, like he's afraid Harold will physically assault him for crossing the threshold. He is holding a steaming cup with the paper label dangling out on the side. “You drink the green one, right?” He makes a face. “There was only one box with a green label, so I guess this is it?”

The hopeful note in his voice is giving Harold a headache. He doesn't have the emotional energy to deal with _kindness_ , he just wants to curl up into a ball until his shift is over. There's a saying in the medical profession that goes something like “The day it stops getting to you is the day you should quit the job”, but the truth is that _everything_ is getting to Harold these days, and he has no idea what to make of that.

“Thank you, that's very thoughtful of you,” Harold says.

John puts the mug down on the desk and stands awkwardly in the middle of the room. He puts his hands into his pockets, then changes his mind and lets them dangle loosely at his side.

“You seemed a little upset, so I thought,” John says. He presses his lips together.

Harold waits for a moment, but apparently John is done with that sentence. “I'm fine,” Harold says, which is the most outrageous lie he has told all day. “Just tired.”

Harold gets up from the bed, intending to walk over to the desk. John is still planted firmly in the middle of the tiny room like an awkward, long-limbed fig tree. He also happens to smell really good, like coffee and the laundry detergent they use on the polo shirts and a little bit like rain.

“I'd really like to make you feel better,” John says, so bone-deep honest that even the most cynical part of Harold has to believe him.

_Why?_ Harold wants to ask, or _Why me?_ or _What is even wrong with you?._ Instead, he lets himself lean forward until he can rest his head against John's chest, press his face into the fabric of John's shirt.

John's arms come around him, resting loosely against his back, like John expects him to bolt any second.

Harold moves back a little, and John releases him instantly.

“I should really–“ Harold says, though he doesn't remember at all what he really should be doing, not with the way John looks at him, eyes dark with a hunger that makes Harold shiver in recognition.

“Do you want me to go?” John asks, his voice a rough whisper.

The cup of tea he brought Harold is sitting on the desk, but Harold doesn't want tea, he doesn't want to sit in this room and drink it by himself, he wants–

“Stay here,” Harold says, and John _grins_ at that, bright and boyish and delighted, and Harold has a sudden need to grab his shirt and pull him down onto the bed and curl up with him in the little, safe nook and ignore the rest of the world forever.

Of course, that's not what happens. What happens is that both their pagers go off at once, a shrill sound splitting the silence like a grenade. Harold fumbles for the leather flap and turns the pager around to see the display. “Possible apoplectic stroke,” he reads out. Lovely.

Harold tries really hard not to look at John from the passenger seat throughout the entire drive. He's afraid if he does, he'll do something stupid like cover John's hand on the gearshift with his own or smile at him in a way that says _“I think about you all the time.”_

–

“You look like _Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend_ should be playing in the background wherever you go. All you need is a fur stole and maybe an expensive handbag,” Root says.

Joss rolls her eyes at her. “It's just a ring, we're not getting a house in the Hamptons any time soon.”

Joss has her hand wrapped around the neck of a beer bottle, the diamond ring on her finger sparkling in the sunlight. Harold barely recognized her when she opened the door. Back on the wards, there was an exhaustion like a ghost lingering behind all of her smiles. Ever since she decided to quit, it's like somebody flicked on a light switch inside of her that makes her shine.

“Do you think I could pull off being a trophy wife?” Root asks thoughtfully.

“You can't quit, you're the only one on the team who doesn't drive like a Formula One racing driver on Adderall,” Harold mutters darkly.

“Also your spouse kind of needs to be rich and successful for that to work,” Carter says. She looks over at Zoe across the garden, who has dressed down for the occasion by taking off her blazer and going barefoot in her pantsuit.

“I am _hugely_ successful, by the way, and fuck you,” Sameen says with a wolfish grin. She has three steaks stacked on a paper plate and is balancing an absurdly large bowl of potato salad in her other hand. “And not everyone gets married to a hotshot lawyer with more money than Bruce Wayne, some of us still have to _work for a living._ ”

Root slides an arm around Sameen's waist possessively. Harold feels a sudden, pathetic sting of jealousy at the sight of them and looks away. A few feet away, John and Taylor are having a very animated discussion about something that Harold can't hear. Occasionally, Taylor tries to switch his soda bottle with John's beer, but John, despite seemingly busy with the barbecue, always manages to sneakily switch them back before Taylor gets to take a sip.

“God, just go and talk to him,” Sameen says through a mouthful of potato salad.

Harold flinches out of his reverie. “Excuse me?” He asks, alarmed.

“You've been staring at his ass for weeks, you work hard, you deserve some downtime,” Sameen says.

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Harold says and takes a panicked sip from his beer.

“Don't listen to her, Harry, she's just trying to manipulate the betting pool in her favor,” Root says.

“The _what_?”

“Oh, there's a betting pool on when Harold and John are going to _bang_?” Joss asks, delighted. “Can I join?”

“You are all horrible,” Harold says, and flees.

–

He manages to avoid John all evening, except then Harold has the spectacularly bad idea to volunteer to help with the cleanup, and finds himself alone in the kitchen with John Reese, a roll of tinfoil and seven different salad bowls.

“Hey,” John says, beaming, like Harold walking into the room is the highlight of his day.

_Goddammit._

“We should talk about this,” Harold says, trying to tear off a bit of tinfoil and only managing to produce tiny, pathetic lametta stripes.

John tilts his head. He's probably itching to reach out and take the tinfoil roll away from Harold, stealth culinary genius that he is, but he is apparently able to control himself. At least he's _wearing a shirt this time._

“This,” Harold says, finally putting down the tinfoil roll and pointing between them. “This _thing_ between us. You flirting with me, and the tea, and the _hugging,_ we need to talk about the hugging especially, and.”

The color drains from John's face, which might be amusing under different circumstances, but in this case just makes Harold feel like an asshole.

“Oh,” John says. “I'm sorry, I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable.”

So you _were_ flirting with me, a part of Harold's brain screams helpfully, like even at this point he wasn't sure. “Well, I am,” Harold says. “I'm tired and lonely and I'm very uncomfortable because I find you wildly attractive and I want to kiss you all the time and it's probably against workplace regulations and all very inconvenient.”

John blinks a few times, like his brain is rebooting. “I– you– _what_?”

Harold sighs. “Go on a date with me,” he says, sighing. “I mean. In case you want to. In case you don't think this will screw up our working relationship, which it possibly might. In case you– In case you still want me.”

In place of an answer, John drops a bowl of tomato salad into the sink, crosses the kitchen and takes Harold's face between his hands to kiss him.

–

**Two months later.**

John takes a look down the corridor to see if anyone is watching – unlikely, since they're all holed up in the common room, eating microwave popcorn and watching the James Bond marathon – then he grabs Harold's belt, drags him into the on-call room, and kicks the door shut behind them.

“ _Christ_ , what are you–“ Harold starts, except John steps closer until Harold's back connects with the door and he's pinned down by John's body, warm and promising in a way that makes Harold blush.

“What do you think?” John asks. His breath tickles Harold's throat, making it extremely difficult to be a sensible human and remember why making out on the job is probably a terrible idea. John nuzzles and licks Harold's skin where the collar of the polo shirt falls open, and Harold reaches out for John by instinct, needing him closer still.

“I, ah. I think this is extremely inappropriate.” Harold's cock disagrees, straining against the fabric of his pants. His body is several steps ahead of him, apparently, and when John looks up at him with a smile that is all mischief, Harold gives in and kisses his stupid, pretty mouth.

“Is this some kind of secret fantasy of yours, to make out in an on-call room?” Harold runs his hands over John's back, a little annoyed at the fabric that's in the way.

John seems to have a similar thought, because he steps back and pulls his shirt over his head and off. Harold hums, pleased, and runs his hands over John's naked shoulders, the arc of his spine.

“It's not about the _room_ , specifically,” John says.

He leans down to suck and bite at the skin above Harold's collarbone, and Harold slaps his shoulder. “Stop it, that will leave a mark.”

“Kind of the point,” John says, grinning, but he relents and reaches down to unbuckle Harold's belt instead.

“ _Oh,_ ” Harold says. He leans back until his head hits the door with a _thud._

John leans close so he can whisper into Harold's ear. “I've been thinking about sucking your cock all morning.”

Harold makes a valiant attempt to mask up the whimper that comes out of his mouth by turning it into a cough, but John's expression communicates that he sees right through it. The hand John has shoved down Harold's pants communicates mostly that Harold might need a clean pair of pants soon-ish.

Then John slides down to his knees and unzips Harold the rest of the way. Harold runs his hand over John's bicep when he notices the nicotine patch under his fingers. “Wait,” Harold says.

John looks up at him, biting his lip, an image like something straight out of gay porn.

“This is about you trying to quit smoking, isn't it,” Harold groans.

John makes an innocent face. “I haven't had a cigarette in 24 hours and I'm perfectly fine.”

“You sucked on a lemon popsicle for breakfast,” Harold says flatly.

John's shoulders are shaking with repressed laughter. “Harold, you're the only person I know who would deliberately try to talk someone out of blowing them just to make a point.”

“My dick,” Harold says, with as much dignity as he can muster, “is not your personal lemon popsicle.”

“Hmmh,” John says, distractedly, and gives Harold's cock a playful lick.

Harold makes an extremely undignified noise. “Nevermind,” he says, running a hand through John's hair, all soft between his fingers. “ _Do_ go on.”

The skin around John's eyes crinkles in amusement, and then he leans down and takes Harold's cock into his mouth in earnest, and Harold bites his own lip so hard he's afraid he's going to draw blood.

–

It's reckless, to keep sneaking off together during the day. Reckless and _exhilarating_. Harold isn't sure if John is generally extremely eager to go to his knees for him or if he's trying not to relapse into his smoking habit, but he finds that he doesn't really care.

They spend their days off in bed, napping and fucking and eating the breakfast that John makes, pancakes and grapefruit juice and oatmeal. (The first time Harold stays over, the pancakes are cold by the time they get around to eating, but in Harold's defense, it is really difficult to think about food at the sight of John carrying a breakfast tray into the bedroom in just his boxers, his hair all mussed up and with morning stubble on his chin. Harold is only human after all.)

There _is_ something that Harold minds, though.

“Is there a reason you get me off and then essentially flee the room two seconds after?” Harold asks, still a little breathless. He's trying not to sound accusatory. He doesn't think that he's doing a very good job.

John shrugs. “I'm a busy guy,” he drawls. He zips Harold back up and leans in to kiss him.

It's been three smoke-free weeks for John, but if anything, the blow job frequency has only increased. It's not like Harold _minds,_ he's not completely out of it, it's just that he wonders why it is that John doesn't seem to be able to get out of the room after fast enough, seemingly uncaring about his own orgasm.

Harold puts his hands over John's hips and pulls him close. “Tell me the truth,” he says.

John kisses him again, probably for distraction purposes. There's a small part of Harold that insists that despite John's continuing oral fixation, maybe he's just not _that_ into him, and Harold would really like to shut that voice up. Harold slides a hand between them to palm John's cock through the fabric, and John gasps into his mouth.

“I like how it feels,” John says, rubbing himself against Harold. “It's good to want something when I know–“ He trails off.

“When you know you'll get it eventually,” Harold says. He strokes his thumb over the side of John's face, and John's eyelids flutter.

“I'm not used to that part,” John admits, brutally honest in a way that makes Harold flinch. “The part where I get what I want.”

Harold swallows. He tries to settle on something to say, but all of the phrases that he can think of seem hollow, meaningless. Instead, he asks: “What do you want right now?”

John turns his head and brushes his lips over Harold's thumb, kisses his palm. “Touch me,” he says.

Harold pulls him closer, and John melts against him like he's not made of solid things at all, like he is a shape that's built to fit around Harold's body. Harold slips his hands beneath John's shirt to get at bare skin, and John sighs.

“You can have whatever you want from me,” Harold says against John's throat, kissing the skin there as if he can seal the words inside.

John bows his head and rests it against Harold's shoulder, breathing deeply, and Harold strokes his fingertips over the arch of John's spine, all the nerves and blood vessels running beneath skin and muscle and bone.

– fin


End file.
